The Returns

by Philip Salom

  THE RETURNS

  THE

  RETURNS

  A NOVEL

  PHILIP

  SALOM

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © 2019 Philip Salom

  First published 2019

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover design: Josh Durham/Design by Committee

  Author photograph: Tanja Rankin Photography

  Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by Cannon Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A pre-publication-entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-26-2

  Part One

  THE WOMAN OUTSIDE Trevor’s bookshop window hesitates when she sees him approaching from across the street. Cars are driving past. There are dead flies against the glass. She seems to fade, dizzy perhaps from low salt, or blood pressure, and tilts forward with both hands against the glass. Her eyes are shut. Trevor is not a man of action, but he is deft enough to rush across the pavement and reach to stop her falling. She is conscious enough to mumble something as she tries to straighten up.

  Then she looks at him. She is big-eyed and wide-cheeked, whereas he is merely big. He looks like the guy holding the ballerina: she has the intense expression and body of a ballerina. For some strange reason her hair is purple.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, sounding clearer now, but looking away. ‘Bit of a worry, that. Whatever that was.’

  He sees her teeth are large and white and even. He waits, door key in his other hand.

  ‘Yes, whatever it was,’ he says. ‘Are you OK?’

  He realises this sounds pretty stupid. Clearly she’s not.

  ‘Come into the shop and sit down,’ he adds. ‘I’m sorry if I’m sounding like a daytime soapie. I can make you an invigorating herb tea, I have several varieties. In place of the traditional swig of brandy.’

  ‘Think I’d prefer the brandy.’

  ‘Well, I can stretch to a brandy if you’d like one.’

  ‘No, I don’t drink it.’

  ‘Ah, right.’

  ‘My diet …’

  ‘You’re on a diet?’

  Her arm had felt slim, even skinny, like one of those worrying anorexics. Trevor is not the most tolerant of people. Nor is he slim, life has come to his waistline. His obvious bulk makes her lack of it seem more extreme. Starving and fainting, the next thing you know she’ll be down under the shelf between fad diets and Dickens’ waifs.

  ‘No, I’m not on a bloody “diet”,’ she says. ‘I just have to be careful not to …’

  The impulse to explain her eating habits is oddly strong. But the man has helped her and shouldn’t be caught in his own shop on the logic of her dietary compulsions, the food you should and the food you shouldn’t. Well, she shouldn’t.

  Tea, then, he decides, and opens the shop. When the bell above the door tinkles he looks up and frowns.

  He indicates the chair near the books on the display shelf and when he sees she can walk steadily enough and sit without leaning he moves into a back room to make the tea, leaving her to look around the shop without any necessity of speaking. A CD begins playing and she isn’t sure if it’s bookshop opera or her addled head.

  ‘Cheese,’ he says, ‘is a pretty safe bet. In diets, I mean. Just as long as you don’t drive your cholesterol up like those zealous vegetarians who eat cheese like fast food. With their hearts so pure but their arteries as full of fat-bergs as a London sewer …’

  ‘ Cheese?’

  ‘You don’t approve of cheese? Ah, you’re a vegan.’

  Now that she is easing back into regular breathing she thinks she is inside the cliché of ‘fainted away and rescued by a strange gentleman’. Very strange in this case. She is surrounded by books, shelf after shelf of words, left to right and unread, until one book is carried out in a paper bag. And a man isn’t a stranger if he has a public shop, if you follow the logic. Even though he sounds clipped and as deep as a character in a Russian movie, he talks as if he knows her.

  ‘And I am not a bloody vegan, either,’ she says, looking around her. ‘I’m a book person. Ah, you have a blue wall.’

  ‘I mean it’s my job,’ she adds, more loudly now he’s in the adjoining room. ‘I’m a book editor. I sometimes inspect your window display. Interesting design.’

  The thump of a fridge door covers something he is saying until he steps back into the shop.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘What do you mean, you know?’

  ‘Inspected my book window,’ he says. ‘People forget themselves when they stare at displays, like the diamond rings and bracelets in the jewellery shop next door. I have noticed it: people are dazed by jewellery. But when they inspect books they frown, or look questioning. Though, as far as I can see, more people walk past noting their reflection-selfie than look at the books.’

  ‘You’ve seen me stop here and frown?’

  ‘Can’t vouch for frowning but you came into the shop. You looked around the F’s anyway … Elena Ferrante? A lot of women are reading her. Pity she was outed, though. I enjoyed not knowing who she was. Anonymity.’

  He is doing the full bass-baritone.

  ‘In my experience,’ says Elizabeth, ‘readers get a significant thrill from knowing about their favourite authors.’

  It is annoying – a stranger having the jump on you like this. Anyone having the jump on you like this. She hasn’t forgotten that she came inside once, looked through the fiction shelves without purchasing anything, just made a mental note to return and then, as with most mental notes, didn’t.

  She stands and stares at him. She is quite tall. But she wavers. He wonders if he should reach out to reassure her, even hold her arm. Instead, he sees her face shut.

  ‘Don’t need the tea,’ she says, pulling back. ‘Really, I am feeling better. I have things to do … I’ll come back this afternoon.’

  She moves to the door and escapes. While the door is open he hears the accelerating sounds as cars appear over the crest and speed downhill from the lights. Then, more slowly, a tram, with several very slow faces staring out.

  He is still holding the steaming mug.

  She looks like the English actress Sally Hawkins, star of the Oscar-winning movie, a fable of sorts. But Trevor is no actor and the poetry of an erratic personality un-nerves him. He grew up in a family with one: his father, a man who was never one thing if he could be two. Even so, Trevor starts to anticipate her return. As they say, eagerly. Because he also likes difference, and he is a curious man even though his first act after she has gone is to check his public liability plan.

  Her name is Elizabeth but he didn’t ask and she doesn’t come back.

  Sometimes mornings just get worse. Most mornings Elizabeth rakes not only her front garden, she scrabbles her implement over the small verge ostensibly her own and her two neighbours’. She performs like a film extra, pointlessly, wordlessly. Speech is not required. She is scraping marginalia into the verge and she does it with concentration.

  If people approach her she may stop raking and say hello. They may stop and make a comment, because she is friendly and because her dog gives them an excuse. If they are men. Women simply stop and say hello. Her medium-sized dog is a brown guardian and rufffluff with large eyes. Gordon. And Gordon is a setter, or mostly setter, in some degree at least kelpie, and Elizabeth would have preferred a Labrador-kelpie had she chosen th
e dog. Her daughter bought and pampered, then abandoned, this dog for a dog-blind boyfriend, so Elizabeth has inherited both the dog and the dog’s bloody name. He’s a Gordon setter, duh, golden and with a limp. Children are so embarrassing.

  ‘Oh isn’t that terrible, limping like that.’

  ‘Oh you poor thing.’

  Gordon slumps and waggles and lays it on like a hypochondriac. He is a fat dog and this is a lot of acting. But Elizabeth plays up to people just as much as her dog and she is noisier. She has noticed how genuinely touched people are by animal injuries, especially any concerning limbs. It is sad. They think of cars and broken legs and the animal’s mute suffering. A dog she once had with a front leg missing. It was running around one minute then a car hit it like a pack of Staffies. People are sad when she tells them the neighbour’s young cat is half blind. When it jumps it misses.

  Sometimes a man stops and stares at her. She has sworn at him before. He might be unstable, or he might be sad. Gordon does a Humphrey Bogart snarl and the man walks on past, remembering the dog has a mind of its own and is not on a leash. If Gordon is older in dog years than the woman is, he is at least brushed and glossy, whereas her hair is wrenched back into tufts. Her hair is terrible.

  She has been a publishing editor for years. She no longer worries if authors frown when they read in their margins her sudden notes and outlines of character shifts. Corrections, possibilities. C and P. She never let authors know how ferally invigorating she finds her job. When she thinks up phrases to embolden the anxious types who brood too little and drink too much. There are a lot of them. Whether they write too much or they write too little they agonise with a sad intensity over their words and over writers who are feted. Not her: every book she edits has its virtues.

  More or less. When she worked in-house, she had worked on big books and sometimes manuscripts from the wildest, if not-quite-realised writers. Now she is working part-time she admits some manuscripts bother her. The lack of challenge. Not for her so much as in the writer’s habitual conformity. Like a lover who does nothing unexpected, ever, and keeps on doing it. She aches for some radical disturbance.

  There is something nervous and noticeable about the thinned areas of her scalp showing where the clips have pinched her hair too severely. Perhaps for all her precision with the text, then, she is indifferent to personal finish, to decorum; she is a dag, because she can be if she works from home, and no one ‘sees’ editors anyway, which suits her perfectly. Her attitude is simple: why shouldn’t people be invisible?

  So Elizabeth rakes and scrapes. Although this is not mindfulness – even the term makes her groan – the air above her is clear and fresh, one of the main reasons she chose this elevated street in North Melbourne, with its crisp wind blowing off the bay and its effortless eucalypts and the sudden batik of lorikeets. Just her and all this. And, parked against the kerb, her car.

  She drives a 1965 long-bonnet EH Holden, a car born in the same decade as herself. Or thereabouts. A manual, of course, in immaculate steel grey bodywork and red vinyl bench seats, a collector’s piece parked on a public street. The car is more handsome in her mind than her erstwhile husband ever was. And she still has it. Most of her driving involves trips out of town to see her ageing mother in Ballarat, and the ageing EH motor roars and the differential whines as she shoves the column shift up and down through the three long gears, accelerating firmly to get the most out of the big six. She loves the sound and the strange prestige of this phrase the big six. She is a Holden nut.

  As for driving, this woman is not subtle, but the car is less so, it needs a bit of a shove these days. The clutch is heavy, everything is manual, mechanical, a disadvantage few drivers would believe, but Elizabeth has calf muscles like a squash player’s. She drives properly with both hands on the steering wheel, which has a modern steering wheel cover to make it thicker and more sensual and not as odd as holding the original rim, as skinny as a whippet. Ah, the old EH Holden is a thing of beauty: with its column gear shift and bench seats so Gordon can walk from side window to side window without stepping over anything except the driver.

  To Ballarat. Until she clears the city this kind of driving is an ordeal, braking for traffic lights, sitting in neutral then pushing hard to keep the clutch in until she eases off from the lights then gunning the old thing. The car revs and hisses, and yes, it rattles from the dashboard, from the tray, from joints hidden inside the doors or the boot, and scary banging noises jolt up from the hard, inflexible world of its suspension. The car is filled with eccentric noise.

  Her old mother’s house faces west along the short road past the Lake Wendouree that is always Wendouree if not always a lake. She drove up a week ago, a habit of visiting. Familiarities. As she turned in at the driveway she heard that crunch of blue metal under her tyres and felt the car’s warmth and smell, like a dog lying in the sun, the old vinyl of the seats and dashboard rising over her like good humour. She can always be certain of this ritual of contentment: her unusual car, arriving, the sound of blue metal. Then reaching for the key, and waiting. She always waits until she sees the curtains move.

  ‘Now, Elizabeth,’ her mother had said, ‘I want you to promise me, when the time is right, to contact that good Dr Nitschke. You know the man, he’s famous. And let me arrange a dignified end. Nothing, nothing could be worse than shrinking into something awful, gowned and gaga, me, after all the holy things that I have seen, to become a blob in a corridor of some shithole of a nursing home.’

  Oh, and how she had seen. Gods. Elizabeth’s mother has been a religious tramp all her life. From a hippie in the dope years of Fremantle to a fully self-centred Rajneeshee in Poona. People have forgotten the Rajneeshees but they live on in Wikipedia. Her mother met God in the deep eyes of the Bhagwan (or was it Bhagwan in the deep eyes of God?). Then her mother had sought a lesser deity: she married a publican in Ballarat. Sometimes her talk is joltingly retrospective: Bhagwan, Ballarat and the front bar. Then back to the good old Roman Catholic Church of her childhood.

  Now, self-extinction? Isn’t that a mortal sin?

  As she drove home, this particular request was difficult to un-remember. An ear-worm. Or like something sitting on the front bench seat beside her, not wearing its seatbelt. Elizabeth drove back to the city half-singing ‘Exit International’ as if it were The Internationale, like an old leftie in a beery voice. It made the old EH leap ahead, though that might just have been the downhill trip. And then she imagined the Philip Nitschke Doctor Death dance- and-chorus line, all the old folk too weak to kick up their heels but happy enough to die.

  What Elizabeth began to think of were the man’s scary machines, how over the years they had changed from an attachésized aluminium case of packs and tubes, to a computer-and-box set-up, to the gas bottle and its small red case – each looking padded and coffin-suggestive – to the recent container no larger than a toiletry bag. Cold and canned. For travelling not very far but one way only.

  How bloody macabre.

  She had kissed her mother and hugged her for reassurance.

  In theory, if she had to, Elizabeth could live in Ballarat and look after her mother. By doing her editing work from home, as she already does, nothing much would change apart from the distance. Instead of driving up to Ballarat every week she could drive down to the city when required for meetings.

  If she has looked after ailing pets, will an ageing mother be different, simply feed her by the hour to keep her weight up, pay her more attention without quite caring, watch her chewing slow down in front of you, her cat’s-eye weeping and her dog-legs dragging until …? Therefore Elizabeth knows putting the final matter off is quite possible until Death will not leave the room. Drifting, as she had, inevitably, as she grew older, back to the theatre of Rome. If not to serve, then to feel important. The wafer and wine, the Catholic communion of her youth. God drinks in mysterious ways.

  But Dr Nitschke?

  Sometimes, standing in the sun, Elizabeth admires the
softly skeletal cirrus: even if she feels the sky high above her under the central beam of a long roof, it is not a religious feeling. If the air is blue, or at night a shot of green, this is secular. Unlike her mother, whose waves of religious craziness broke around her during childhood, she has never been formally religious or inclined to exaggerations of consciousness. It just seems there are moments akin to a special promise made to a child looking up into the face above her. Elizabeth. … when the time is right …

  Verge-raking over, she walks back inside to call the local council. Elizabeth uses her cordless landline, walking around in her loose dress, trying to convince the city council to adjudicate on the matter of the broken fence behind her house. The broken fence and the broken neighbour. She stands on her verandah looking over at the evidence, broken pickets, clinging viny growth hanging from his side, a threatening long-handled shovel leaning across the boundary line. The council is represented by a thin voice inside a vast office somewhere in the city, like Rob Brydon’s Man in a Box skit on TV, except this voice is indifferent, barely conscious, judging from the evidence of yes and no and yairs and sighs and moments of other conversations held concurrently with other members of the office, mobile held to some part of the chest to muffle Elizabeth’s hearing.

  Even as she tries to make her allegation the man walks through the gap in the fence, raises the shovel above his head and grimaces at her. He doesn’t move after that, just holds this ugly pose, cursing something she cannot hear. Behind him the darkness reaches towards his boots. The front of him is dimly lit, the rest shadowed.

  Becoming more normal, albeit thin and soprano, the council voice says Elizabeth is worried for no reason, it happens all the time, disputes do, and suggests she consult the council’s internet material more closely. Contact them again only, and only, if the communication breakdown with her neighbour to which she refers has reached an impasse. He says imp-arse. A new fence is a joint agreement and cost – it will cost, won’t it? – and everyone has to agree.